Assessment and Experimental Development Analysis Study of an Ion Thruster

When we speak of thrusters the first thing came into mind was engines with propellers which pulls air from one side and throws it back from the opposite side to create thrust but can’t operate in vacuum so we invented chemical thruster which can operate in space and uses a mixture of oxidizer and fuel to generate thrust. But thrust can also be produced by using ions and that kind of thrusters are known as ion thrusters it uses gasses as fuel and high voltage to turn those gasses to ions with tremendous velocity which interns produce thrust. The first functional ion engine sent to space could produce a thrust of only 91 mN[5] of thrust and uses xenon as fuel because of its higher mass value and because it’s a inert gas. However, with no gravity in space, this small thrust accelerated the space­craft to an amazing 41,260 km/hr speed. Our aim will be to increase the efficiency and thrust production capability by applying some change in the existing model and to check if we can run this thruster with regular air at 1atm and can have similar or better results than using Xenon as a propellant. With the improvement of technologies ion thruster technologies has also seen many breaks through form producing a mere amount of 91mN thrust to 5N of thrust produced by NASA’s X3 prototype in 2017.[2] So, there is a high chance that ion thrusters will replace chemical thrusters in near future and it may also replace the mechanical thruster which uses propellers.